The silent return of landmines in Europe

This article contains graphic descriptions that some readers may find disturbing.

The past months have seen an exodus of European countries from a long-standing international law prohibiting the use of anti-personnel mines. Signed in Ottawa in 1997, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty (Ottawa Convention) outlaws landmines and cluster munitions as indiscriminate weapons. 

Not a party to the Ottawa Convention, the Russian military’s use of landmines in Ukraine has intensified since the full-scale invasion in 2022. To secure their borders and rebalance what Ukraine’s foreign affairs ministry referred to as Russia’s "asymmetric advantage", Eastern European countries are now prioritising the strategic use of indiscriminate weapons over the humanitarian norms that banned them in the first place. 

Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland are all in the process of withdrawing. Ukraine announced its intent to withdraw in July, in violation of rules of war that prevent countries from withdrawing from humanitarian laws in the midst of active conflict. 

The abandonment of such international humanitarian law by European countries has sparked campaigns to defend the mine ban, in order not to undermine past horrors. 

A War Beneath the Soil

Ukraine is now one of the most landmine-polluted countries in the world, with roughly a quarter of land affected by landmines and unexplored ordnance. Without a clear picture of contamination in Russian-controlled Donetsk and Luhansk, all eastern provinces, including Kherson and Zaporozhizhi, are affected. 

Contamination by landmines and unexploded ordnance has devastated Ukraine’s agricultural sector, with an estimated USD 11.2 billion in damages in a country known as the breadbasket of Europe. In the farming heartland of Barvinkivska, approximately 17,000 hectares of agricultural land is contaminated.

Use has been attributed to both Russian and Ukrainian forces. Since 2022, an estimated 413 people have been killed and 966 injured by landmines in Ukraine, with over a thousand casualties caused by cluster munitions. As of late 2024, an estimated 5.4 million people in Ukraine require assistance with mine action.

With Russia’s invasion now spilling into its fourth year, Matthew Breay Bolton, political science professor at Pace University in New York City and a members of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a campaign which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. reflected on his time in northeastern Bosnia, seven years after the end of the deadliest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. 

"How is this somehow magically different from anything else that has happened in history?" said Bolton.

Before entering academia, Bolton worked as an aid worker clearing landmines. Through the early 2000s, humanitarian missions took him to the world’s most contaminated countries. Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Croatia, Cambodia, Sudan, Laos, Thailand—countries that, for decades, have struggled to clear the remnants of war. 

On the winding Sava River in present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, the town of Brčko is nestled in a region itself known as the breadbasket of the Balkans. Brčko was caught in the heat of the Bosnian War, with horrific crimes against humanity committed against thousands of Muslim and non-Serb civilians. Until Brčko was finally declared landmine-free this past May, thirteen thousand square kilometres of land had been contaminated.

Participating in an agricultural and environmental rehabilitation program in 2002, Bolton arrived "naive and relatively uninformed." Peace reigned on paper. But war was still a "fact of life," he said. It was difficult for people to return amid continued cultural hostility and the devastation of entire livelihoods. "The frontlines had run through some of the farmers’ fields," he explained. "There was this real sense the war was persisting into the present."

Political tensions, exacerbated by a government that alternates between the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, further hindered a faltering sense of progress in the region’s post-conflict reconstruction. Removing landmines, Bolton described, "felt like a way to address this pervasive insecurity."

For residents and aid workers alike, some spectres haunt long after landmines have been removed. "They create this reverberating, pervasive sense of terror on the landscape," Bolton told FairPlanet. Fear develops insidiously. Mundane details, like vegetation growing at the same height or the same types of plants in a field, hint toward a moment in time when people fled. An entire continent away, the plastic of a sprinkler head can keep the war alive. 

Often encased in plastic, factory-made anti-personnel mines are triggered by weight, exploding with as little pressure as 5 to 15 kilogrammes - somewhere between the weight of a cat and a toddler. Landmines do not differentiate between military and civilians, let alone between enemy and friendly forces. Neither are they necessarily placed to kill. People are blown apart, and if they survive, may lose their eyesight, hearing, and limbs, sustain horrific burns and scarring and incur damage to internal organs and nerves. 

Cluster munitions, also banned under the Ottawa Treaty, are anything but precise. By design, they are indiscriminate weapons, deployed from the air or ground and exploding into a cascade of shrapnel, bullets or smaller bomblets that rip through human bodies. Unexploded ordnance also functions like de facto landmines. When munitions fail to detonate on impact, they’re left scattered across the landscape, sinking into soil and peat or drifting into streams and rivers. Hazards that remain hidden and lethal when accidentally triggered.

With slow, dangerous and expensive clearance, landmines and unexploded ordnance can remain in the ground for half a century or longer. Over eighty per cent of victims globally are civilians, many of whom are injured or killed long after conflict is over. Since 1999, children have made up over forty per cent of all landmine victims. 

An Attack on the Architecture of Norms

People cannot always flee mined areas. Nor do they necessarily want to.

As Elliot de Faramond of the humanitarian aid and mine clearance organisation 'Humanity & Inclusion' (HI) explained, some Ukrainian farmers have been using metal detectors to clear their own fields. 

Since HI has withdrawn some operations in eastern Ukraine, "there are certain regions we cannot access, and it is not safe to engage in clearance activities or non-technical surveys," he said. The Ukrainian government has incentivised farmers to clear their own fields, with just under 83 per cent of cleared land returned by October 2024.

HI has denounced countries’ withdrawals from the treaty as risking renewed landmine use, stalled clearance efforts and fewer resources for victims. Instead of further military escalation, the organisation has called on Russia to accede to the mine ban and for Ukraine to destroy its landmine stockpile - confidence-building gestures that could meaningfully contribute to a peace process.  

"What we are seeing, and the message the withdrawals are sending, is that we can sacrifice civilians for border security," de Faramond told FairPlanet. "They are not assuring their objective of security by doing that."

"An attack on the Ottawa Treaty is an attack on the architecture of all norms," he continued. "NATO countries that are parties to the treaty have to step up to be vocal about it, to defend this essential norm, and to engage in all diplomatic action to prevent any further withdrawal from other states."

In Ottawa ahead of the NATO Summit, former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis was convinced that the withdrawal of European countries from the mine ban was right. The perceived imminence of a Russian invasion spurred rearmament in the Baltic. The inefficacy of European military assistance to Ukraine’s defence and the complete dependency of NATO on the US are simply the nail in the coffin. 

But if a military adversary chooses to use barbaric weapons, does this justify abandoning hard-won international humanitarian norms? 

"The ability to use additional weapons is working as a deterrent," Landsbergis told FairPlanet, stressing that Lithuania was at risk of losing its independence for the third time. 

"As Ukrainians, as anybody who has lost their country in the past, we are definitely not ready to go through that again," he said. "We’ll do anything to defend our country, and if that takes killing a lot of Russians, we're ready to do that."

Latvia - where Canada leads the NATO Operation ‘REASSURANCE’ - withdrew on 27 June 2025. Referring to the existential long-term threat of Russia to the NATO alliance and European countries, the Latvian Ministry of Defence told FairPlanet that the decision was made by analysing both the military effectiveness of anti-personnel mines and the political aspects of other Allies' attitudes towards the Convention's obligations."

While Canada has not made public statements, the Latvian Ministry of Defence stated that consultations with allies deployed in Latvia were "important" and that "the Allies expressed their understanding of the Ministry of Defence's proposal to terminate Latvia's participation in the Ottawa Convention." The Ministry assured that civilians would be protected and international humanitarian law would be respected.

The Human Cost of Indiscriminate Warfare

Under the St. Petersburg Declaration, international humanitarian law also seeks to reconcile the necessities of war with the laws of humanity for combatants. The human dignity of combatants is protected not just through the prohibition of torture and execution of prisoners of war, but also through certain restrictions on weapons that may cause superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering. 

Soldiers, too, have felt the burn of betrayal by politicians and generals trading combatants’ humanity for a spectacle of brutality. Across North Africa, Allied and Axis militaries retreated over their own mine fields. American soldiers were blown apart by their own devices on the Ho Chi Minh trail. 

Veterans and landmine survivors have repeatedly denounced use of the weapons. "They have no conscience," Vietnam veteran Paul Nichols responded to US President Donald Trump’s support for landmine production in his first term, calling policy reversal "misguided and unconscionable."

"Why are we survivors of landmines so committed to these priorities?” Cambodian landmine survivor and former soldier Tun Channareth said in Geneva this June, recalling thirteen years lived in a refugee camp in a wheelchair, fleeing the Khmer Rouge and the civil war. "I know that my own suffering makes me want peace and safety for others."

The private sector has moved quickly on an emerging market for indiscriminate weapons. In April, the Finnish company Insta indicated they would produce automated, flying anti-personnel mines that shoot projectiles covering up to 2,000 square metres at once for Finland, without being conclusive about an international market. The company also patented a drone-piloted landmine removal technology. Finland already has a stockpile of 15,000 mines that were not destroyed before its withdrawal from the treaty. 

Poland is also getting ready to plant landmines within its own borders with Russia and Belarus, as its state-run company PGZ prepares for landmine manufacturing.  

Bolton was disgusted. He sees the political punditry around landmine use and the emergence of new landmine technologies as being driven by "very abstract and faulty assumptions about how mines work in the real world," and a "delusion rooted in technophilia."

"It’s rooted in this bloodless, sterile, technocratic idea of conflict - that somehow there’s a magic solution to your deeply rooted, awful political problems," he said. 

Some of the original instigators of the mine ban are seeing the current path as dangerous.

"You have to ask yourself the question today: Who is standing up for international humanitarian law? Who is defending human rights?" Lloyd Axworthy, one of the original architects of the Ottawa Treaty and former Canadian Foreign Minister, told FairPlanet.

"It sends the wrong signal and becomes a license for others to begin thinking the same way."

Axworthy denounced Canada’s silence on international humanitarian law amid a single-minded focus on trade with the U.S, saying "we’re abandoning a significant Canadian contribution to making the world a safer place."

"If anything, we’re falling increasingly back into a smaller and smaller orbit about how do we protect just ourselves, and we’re not worried about other people."

Axworthy sees a historic opportunity for Canada to take the lead at the upcoming December meeting of the treaty’s state parties. "I think Canada should be mounting a campaign to become a chair of that group," Axworthy said. The Presidency is currently held by Cambodia. 

2027 will mark the 30th anniversary since the treaty was signed. The International Coalition to Ban Landmines (ICBL) has campaigned for countries to uphold international humanitarian law by mobilising in international forums, petitioning government officials in all withdrawing countries, rallying high-profile support and staging a month-long protest.

"Remind these countries that reaching for outdated, long-banned weapons does not project strength, but rather desperation and weakness," the ICBL stated in March. "Encourage them not to let rational fear of their populations create irrational policy decisions that will have real and long-term repercussions for their people and for IHL more broadly."

In Europe, they garnered the public support of over 80,000 people, and, according to the ICBL, a parallel petition to the Canadian government has garnered thousands of signatures. 

As the public outcry for conscience grows, some Pacific island nations have taken a principled stance, with Tonga ratifying the Ottawa Convention in June and the Republic of the Marshall Islands ratifying in March.

They know well the cruelty of indiscriminate weapons. For over a decade, the US military tested nuclear weapons by relentlessly bombing the islands, and sending entire communities fleeing from the explosions and high levels of contamination. Nuclear fallout persists in the coral atolls to this day. Without a history of domestic landmine production or use, for the Marshall Islands, this experience is enough to fight against all indiscriminate weapons. 

"As a nation still enduring the painful legacy of nuclear weapons testing, we also know what it means to live with a past we did not choose," Marshallese ambassador Doreen deBrum stated in Geneva in June. "We understand the anguish that indiscriminate weapons bring, and our experiences with these weapons reaffirm that they must be confined to history."

Image by Ignat Kushanrev.